Leicester's Hospitals Selects Nervecentre as Hospital at Night Solution

WOKINGHAM, England, March 12, 2013 /PRNewswire/ --

Nervecentre's mobile healthcare technology and communications solution to enable Leicester's Hospitals to achieve safer clinical care out of hours

Leicester's Hospitals has gone live with the Nervecentre mobile healthcare Hospital at Night solution to support a new way of managing out-of-hours care as part of its Hospital 24/7 programme. Nervecentre will replace the trust's traditional 'bleep' paper-based system of communication for managing clinical tasks out of hours with one that enables the communication of live patient-related information between a senior nurse coordinator and clinicians' secure smartphones over the trust's wireless network. In doing so, Leicester's Hospitals will be better able to prioritise patient-related tasks based on clinical need and ensure that the right healthcare professional is guided to the right place at the right time. Nervecentre will also provide Leicester's Hospitals with data on out-of-hours activity and facilitate the prioritisation of services and clinical personnel.

For all non-core hours, comprising 75% of the week, the staff use Nervecentre to request and coordinate the allocation of all clinical requests from wards through to multidisciplinary clinical team. Compared to the use of a 'bleep' this reduces internal delays and improves accuracy and visibility of information, improving patient safety and staff experience, as well as providing a governance record of every activity performed in the hospital allowing for continuous process improvement.

Using the Nervecentre software and Leicester's Hospitals' wireless infrastructure, all tasks will be logged on to a ward-based desktop PC, and the task sent wirelessly to the senior nurse coordinator who carries an iPhone, iPad or other smart tablet. The coordinator will then assign the task to the most appropriate team member. This will be received by the team member via their iPhone or other smartphone device. The task is accepted by the team member, and is added to their task list held on their phone. It stays active until the team member has completed the task.

Caroline Barclay adds, "We know from experience that urgent tasks are typically appropriately managed during out-of-hours care. The difficulty comes in prioritising those non-urgent tasks. Without the ability to communicate patient-related information, it is impossible to make the value judgment between what really is a non-urgent 'green' task and one that is slightly higher priority or 'amber'. Nervecentre, however, will enable us to prioritise tasks dependent on clinical need - and do so quickly and efficiently."

Summarising why Leicester's Hospitals selected Nervecentre and what they are hoping to achieve, Caroline Barclay concludes, "Ultimately, it's about patient safety. Nervecentre is an enabling IT solution that is designed around the needs of the patient and the clinician."

About Nervecentre

Nervecentre Software Ltd is a Healthcare-focused consultancy and software development organisation committed to helping NHS Trusts improve productivity and quality through innovative collaboration technology. 

The challenge facing today's hospitals is to continue to improve the level of care provided whilst decreasing the cost of providing that care. This will require increased productivity from clinical staff, increased staff flexibility and tight governance of processes to ensure safety. When hospitals are at their busiest, systems and processes should ensure priority activities still receive the focus they need.

The goal of Nervecentre is to both increase the productivity of staff by improving communication, and at the same time build a comprehensive picture of the hospital's performance, to provide management with the information they need to correctly staff and run a major hospital. Nervecentre Software Ltd provides consultancy and technology to help measure and improve performance, increase teamwork, and increase productivity.

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